Virgin Media to increase top UK consumer broadband speed to 350Mbps

Virgin Media has announced its top broadband speed for British households is to be raised from 300Mbps to 350Mbps.

The increase will come into effect in spring, and means consumers will be able to get top speeds comparable to what the provider already delivers to many of its business broadband customers.

Virgin Media also confirmed that it attracted 196,000 new broadband customers in 2017, with 25,000 of them signing up in the final quarter of the year.

This took its overall broadband consumer base up to 5.1 million.

Many of these people are opting to sign up for packages that offer the highest speeds.

Indeed, 70 per cent of its broadband customers are now on speeds of 100Mbps or more, compared with 52 per cent a year earlier.

In addition, Virgin Media noted that 2.9 million - or more than half - of its broadband subscribers now have its best-in-class Wi-Fi router.

The company went on to note that its £2 billion Project Lightning scheme, designed to connect four million premises to its ultrafast broadband network, delivered this service to 159,000 new premises between October and December.

This was a record for Virgin Media, following delivery to 147,000 new premises in Q3 and 127,000 in Q2 - and took the overall number of connected premises up to 1.1 million.

"We successfully executed the price increase last November and continued rolling out cutting-edge products like our Wi-Fi Connect and V6 set-top boxes, which we will continue to aggressively deploy in 2018."

Virgin Media was recently named as one of the best performers in Ofcom's complaints data for July to September 2017.

The provider was the subject of just 14 complaints per 100,000 customers - beating the industry average of 18 complaints per 100,000 customers during Q3 2017.

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